The biggest problem with writing down my stuffing recipe is that the answer to every question about ingredients is “It depends.” So rather than writing a recipe, I’m going to attempt to guide you through all the different ways it depends and how to make your own choices.

… So, last night, when Ben and Stephanie and I got to Azia and were expecting Ana, but she was running late, I suggested that we order Ana’s favorite dish and wine. This way Ana would be taken care of when she arrived, and we would not have to mess around. I am so incredibly thoughtful that I can’t even believe it sometimes.

It turns out that Azia no longer serves this dish, but that did not matter. Our waiter, who was excellent, simply arranged for the dish to be made, and for a proper wine to be uncorked. The dish was significantly larger than I remembered it, several feet in diameter and teeming with what looked like the day’s catch from a medium-sized trawler (but with no turtles). We were about halfway through when Ana arrived, and I know she appreciated the fact that we had arranged the dinner in her honor, even if we had already eaten most of it….

I had finished eating and finally had my hands free to take some notes, but I couldn’t keep up with Matt Entenza’s torrent of ideas for what he sees in Minnesota’s future. In particular, his ideas on what he would like to do for an economy that needs boosting.

Matt recommended the steak kebab, and I took him up on it. Tenderly cooked with Mediterranean spices and set on a bed of saffron rice, it was the best kebab I had eaten in a very, very long time. I highly enjoyed myself. The meal and the food were important but more important was the company. Matt proved to be very good company indeed.

It is not that I’m a slow learner. Rather, I’m somewhat traumatized by subway sandwiches. This is because of Mike’s Submarine Sandwiches at the corner of Washington and Central in my home town. Mike’s was in an old red brick building sticking out at the end of a triangular junction between these two major streets, sitting right at the junction of “downtown” and “uptown.”

When I lived in Dallas, I had a friend who had been to Naples to study architecture. He told me that the first time he went to a pizza restaurant in Naples, he was surprised that pizza in Naples is so much different than it is in Texas. He described to me a pizza made with a light sprinkling of cheese, olive oil and a pair of eggs. Instead of placing the pizza in a convection oven, the chef placed it on a hearth to bake. He told me that while he was hesitant to try it, the pie turned out to be delicious. When I saw “Pizza Con Uovo,” on the menu at Pizza Nea, I just had to try it.

So I arrived at the coffee shop not entirely sure why I was there or what I was going to do or even exactly whom I was meeting. I had a vague idea of who Lizzie was, but it would be all too easy to get it wrong and mistake her for someone else or someone else for her. She was small, had red hair, and would be wearing black, as most of my students seemed to. Among the young women in the coffee shop, this ruled out…almost no one.

We needed to talk, to spend some time alone and in a fairly quiet, undisturbed location so we could discuss a mutual friend who had gotten into some very serious trouble. We needed to find out where we each were on the issue, about our respective mutual states; we needed to compare notes and remember details covering several years of time; we needed to talk about what had to happen next. And given our schedules, we needed to eat. Which is fortunate, because it was time for me to write another restaurant review.

For some reason, Susan didn’t seem to like me very much. I have no clue as to why not. I was as agreeable as a kid as I am now as an adult. Whenever we would go into her restaurant, she would smile at my friends and then give me a disapproving glance. It didn’t seem to matter how nice I was. It might have had something to do with some mischief my cousin had created, or perhaps my older brother. I had certainly never skipped out on a meal without paying for it.